NASA Needs You: 6 Ways to Help an Astronomer

Space is a big place, and even with their giant telescopes, astronomers just can’t cover it all. This is where you come in. Yes, you.

Astronomy is one of the few scientific fields where amateur scientists can, and frequently do, make significant contributions. But now space scientists are increasingly also looking to people with little or no training for help with their research. Sometimes they are looking for free labor for tasks that humans can still do better than computers, like identifying different types of galaxies. Other times it’s numbers of eyes on the sky or feet on the ground they’re after. But more and more, they are finding ways to get regular citizens involved.

Amateur astronomers and regular folks have already had an impact on the science by making observations of fleeting cosmic phenomena that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

When an asteroid or a comet hit Jupiter in July 2009 and then again earlier this month, amateur astronomers in Australia and the Philippines were the first to notice. Amateurs have invented new telescopes, kept tabs on variable stars and discoveredcomets. And you don’t even need any fancy equipment.

“We can learn a lot from someone taking a cellphone video of a meteor as it burns up in the atmosphere,” said Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

But what if you’re not the lucky one who is in the right place at the right time? You are still needed. Citizen scientists have also become crucial for helping astronomers with one of their most intractable problems: too much data, too little time.

Here are some astronomy projects you can take part in right now, while you wait for your iPhone to capture a meteor.

Hunt for Meteorites

Last month, NASA tried to recruit meteorite hunters when cameras at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center recorded the path of a meteor from its home in the asteroid belt to just 23 miles above the Earth’s surface. The 60-pound rock is thought to have smashed into the ground near Scottsboro, Alabama, on May 18.

“This is the first time our cameras picked up something we thought produced meteorites on the ground,” Cooke said. “If we find the one in Scottsboro, we know exactly where it came from.”

Knowing both the path the meteorite took and what it’s made of would give scientists a complete picture of the rock’s life, and they were anxious to find it. But after two days of searching, NASA’s meteorite basket came up empty.

So Cooke called on the masses. NASA issued a press release on May 20 asking anyone who found a funny rock near Scottsboro to call them.

“People in the public contribute a lot to meteor science,” Cooke said. “My hope was that it landed on somebody’s farm, and they thought, ‘Where the heck did that rock come from?'”

Mars Student Imaging Project

A group of 16 middle schoolers recently found a cave on Mars while taking part in the Mars Student Imaging Project, NASA reported on June 17. The project invites fifth graders through college sophomores to develop a question about geological processes on Mars, and then lets them steer the camera on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to find the answers. Since it started in 2004, more than 50,000 students have participated, answering questions from “What are the relationships between wind streaks and craters?” to “How can comparing Earth channels to channels on Mars help us to find possible water sources on Mars?”

HiWish

Another Martian portrait painter, the HiRISE, or High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has been taking stunning close-ups of Mars since 2006. In January, the team gave the public a shot at the shutter button. With HiWish, anyone with a web connection can suggest the next place on Mars to point the camera.

The site got hundreds of suggestions in the first few days, and the first eight images were released on March 31. Suggestions are ranked based on scientific interest. When you make a suggestion, you can choose two of 17 science themes — like Climate Change, Future Exploration/Landing Sites, or Volcanic Processes — that you think fit your suggestion.

The HiRISE blog offers some tips for improving your chances of having your suggestion selected:

Make sure you justify your choice based on small features like boulders or dunes, not big ones like volcanoes or channels. Mars has been photographed extensively already, so the suggestions that make the best use of HiRISE’s meter-scale resolution are the most interesting.

Be a Martian

The “Be a Martian” tool, a joint project between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Microsoft, has by far the sleekest user interface of any crowdsourced Mars exploration program. The science activities are basic but useful: Users can count craters or align images of Mars from two different orbiting cameras, MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) on Mars Global Surveyor and THEMIS (THermal EMission Imaging System) on Mars Odyssey.

But the whole thing is couched in a make-believe Martian civilization. You can sign up as a Martian citizen, discuss and vote on issues (basically, ask questions on a message board and give thumbs up to favorite posts), watch videos from JPL in the Two Moons Theater, and send postcards to the rover Spirit. A dramatic introductory video intones, “Mars exploration is a civilization endeavor, no longer restricted to the intrepid few, but to all who wish to share in the journey of discovery…. Join us, and we can work together to create the most comprehensive global mosaic of Mars in human history.”

If you like this kind of theatricality, have at it. But if you prefer your Mars exploration straight up, THEMIS has its own, pared-down public mapping project, too.

Stardust@Home

Stardust was the first spacecraft to bring home bits of a comet. It returned to Earth on Jan. 15, 2006, carrying chunks of the comet Wild 2 and speckles of stardust — literally bits of interstellar dust born in distant stars. The comet pieces numbered in the thousands and were easy to find. But scientists estimate the spacecraft collected only about 45 particles of stardust, each of which is just a millionth of a meter across.

So rather than poring over the 1,000-square-centimeter detector one painstaking microscope frame at a time, the Stardust@Home project uses an automated scanning microscope to make hundreds of thousands of images of the detector, and posts them online. Speck candidates will be ranked based on many different viewings to find the ones most likely to really hold some dust.

“No one’s sure what exactly the stardust tracks will look like, so we won’t be able to recognize them until we’ve found one,” the website says.

If you discover a bit of stardust, you’ll get your name on the scientific paper announcing it. You’ll also get to name your bit.

These nearly invisible bits of dust are important because, as Carl Sagan famously said, “We are starstuff.” The heavy elements that ultimately formed the planets, and us, were built in distant stars, and floated around the interstellar medium as stardust after those stars died. This is the stuff that solar systems are made of.

Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo

Galaxy Zoo asks users to help identify and classify more than 60 million galaxies based on their shape, which is easy for human brains but notoriously difficult for computers. In the first incarnation of the program, which launched in July 2007, the images were taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, conducted from a 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico. The project now includes images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well.

Galaxy Zoo has resulted in about 14 published scientific papers examining the directions in which spiral galaxies spin, the relationship between galaxy shape and color, galaxy mergers and a bizarre, surprising object called Hanny’s Voorwerp.